The Trail to Spring

Chapter 21

I had completely recovered the next morning. No more light headedness, or feeling weak or high temperature or anything.

The first thing that I had done after waking up today was to get up and look through the window to see if there was any snow outside. But there wasn't. The ground seemed to be wet but there was no sign of the white wonders that I so longed to see outside.

"The rain melted the snow," Rakesh said, biting into his toast during breakfast, "It is common sense."

I had waited for the detective till late at night yesterday until I had fallen asleep at one point. I noticed that he was wearing a thick jumper suit above his full sleeved sweater today. Maybe Mrs. Majumdar had bought it for him. But I couldn't help but feel a slight sense of uneasiness about this whole thing. He was surely not searching for my brother so late at night. What had he been up to?

I was hoping that Rakesh would bring on the topic of The Last Mountain Standing as I had bought the book for him yesterday but he seemed to be interested in quite a different aspect this morning.

"What do you type in your phone all the time, Ms Ganguly?," he said. It was not often that he was curious about stuff.

"It's nothing. I just chat with my friends," I lied. There was no way I was gonna tell him about my writing habit.

"Don't lie, Ms Ganguly," he said, relishing my astonished face, "I have seen you continuously type on your phone without any breaks. If you were chatting with someone, you would have to at least wait for their reply, right? Well, according to me, you might be writing either a story or keeping a diary in your phone. Considering the present circumstances, most probably the latter."

"Mind your own business," I said as I cut down a big piece of the omelette in front of me and put it in my mouth. How could he be right every single time? It bothered me to no end.

After we finished breakfast, the detective and I went and sat outside on the bench in the garden. The sky was much clearer today and the warm and bright sunlight illuminated our surroundings to paint a much brighter and cheerful picture than I had observed the previous day. The surrounding trees, the chirping of the birds in those trees, the narrow upward sloping gravelly path that lead to the front gate glistening under the sunlight, the crystal clear scenery of the far distant mountains in the horizon with the Kanchenjunga playing hide and seek from behind a litany of clouds – the lovely weather seemed to give birth to a new sense of hope in my anxious heart.

Rakesh took out a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to me.

"Yesterday, I had made a list of hotels and guest houses in Darjeeling that our orphanage could have afforded back then and believe me, that criteria alone narrows down the number of possible options immensely," he said, "I faintly remember the inside of the place where we had stayed and the immediate neighbourhood. We have got to check out these places one by one before we can be absolutely sure, though. But one thing that I can assure you, Ms. Ganguly, is that your brother had surely stayed in one of these places."

I looked at the list and found there were twenty six names of various hotels scribbled on it. I had decided beforehand that if we could successfully ascertain whether dada had indeed stayed back here, I would inform my parents about the same and they could take over from there.

"We can clarify how many people from the orphanage had checked in the hotel. Along with Chintuda's father and the ten children, there should be eleven in all. If we find out that twelve had stayed at the hotel, we can be sure that your brother had come here. I am sure that no eight -year old can stay hidden for a month in such an alien environment," he said.

"But if he hadn't stayed hidden, then why didn't the orphanage inform us about him?," I asked him but didn't get an answer. The detective silently stared up at the sky and remained silent.

We set out in our car soon after and I noticed the detective was whistling and he even cracked a joke or two on the way. I was happy that he was in a much better mood, a complete contrast to the previous two days when he had become a dark and gloomy version of himself. His personality was as strange as his weird whims and I was slowly becoming accustomed to this quirkiness of his. And a part of me had even started loving it.

I had tried to call Grandpa a number of times since morning but his phone was switched off. I could easily have called my parents and asked them about Grandpa but somehow, I could sense that it would not be comfortable for either of us. Grandpa had seemed to be much better the last time I had called anyway, so I wasn't as tensed as before and decided to shelve the call for a later and more appropriate time.

We spent much of the morning and early afternoon in the search for our elusive hotel. In each hotel we visited, we asked if they had kept a customer register that dated back to fourteen years ago. Some of them did keep them and we checked out the names in and around the date when dada had run away. Some smaller hotels didn't have the customer registers that dated back so further and in that case, Rakesh would roam around the hotel to try and remember if he had ever visited it. But as it turned out, none of them turned out to be the one where the orphanage children had stayed all those years ago.

I was sitting alone inside our car and waiting for the detective to complete his round on another hotel with Sukhiji tagging along, when I suddenly sensed the uselessness of the task that we had undertaken.

It seemed as if we were trying to shoot an arrow in the dark and somehow hoped to hit bull's-eye. But there are only so many things that can be achieved through sheer luck. As the number of hotels in the detective's list began to dwindle from twenty six to twenty, then to seventeen and finally came down to fifteen, I increasingly found it more  and more difficult to believe that our search could actually count for something worthwhile.

That's when Atifa called me.